Diana (6 page)

“As hard as I can, I swear…”

“As hard as we can, as hard as we can…”

She said that the only real deathbed is the bed we sleep in alone. I'd told her that death is the greatest adultery, because then we can't keep others from possessing the one we love. Yet in life, I knew from experience, I should avoid even the slightest glint of possessiveness in my eyes. Despite our passionate words, I didn't want to lose sight of the transitory nature of our relationship. I was afraid of falling in love, of really giving my heart to Diana. Even so, no matter what I wanted, I could see the possibility. I relieved my fear the first night of our shared life in that high Mexican desert by summarizing my perverse fantasy in an almost scientific idea.

“We all form triangles,” I told her. “A couple is only an incomplete triangle, a solitary angle, an abbreviated figure.”

“Norman Mailer wrote that the modern couple consists of a man, a woman, and a psychiatrist.”

“And in Stalin's Russia they defined Socialist Realist literature as the eternal triangle made up of two Stakhonovites and a tractor. Don't make jokes, Diana. Tell me what you think of my idea: We all form triangles. All we have to do is discover which. Which?”

“Well, you and I and your wife are already one. My husband, you, and I are another.”

“Obviously. There must be something more exciting, more secret…”

She looked at me as if she was holding back, as if she loved my idea but at the same time rejected it for the moment … I felt (or tried to imagine) that she hadn't rejected it completely, that there was something exciting about the idea of each of us having a lover on the side, but there was something much more exciting in sharing the bed with a third person—man or woman, it didn't matter. Or taking turns—a woman for her and for me one night, a man for the two of us on the next …

We were in our romantic phase. We quickly returned to the plenitude of the couple we were, without need for supplements. And we went back further, much, much further, to an adorable sentiment she expressed.

“I'm anguished by the idea of couples who miss each other.”

“I don't get you.”

“Yes, couples who might have been but who never were,
les couples qui se ratent,
understand? Couples who pass like ships in the night. That really distresses me. You realize how that happens, how often?”

“All the time,” I said, caressing her head resting on my chest. “It's the most normal thing.”

“How happy we are, sweetheart, how lucky…”

“
Désolé,
but we're too normal.”

“Désolé.”

VIII

We discovered that the pharmacy in the town square, exactly as in Flaubert's novels of provincial life, was the social center of Santiago. We amused ourselves seeing what it sold that could not be found elsewhere or what ordinary things in Europe or the United States were unavailable. The perfume section was horrible, all local products with a cheap nightclub smell. They made you want to go to church, inhale incense, and be purified. Any sign of MacLean's toothpaste, Diana's favorite? Not a chance. Bermuda Royal Lyme, my favorite aftershave? We were doomed to Forhans and Myrurgia. We quietly laughed, united in the citizenship of international consumption. Mexico! Land of high tariffs and industries protected from foreign competition!

Santiago's university students would meet at the door of the pharmacy, and one of them came over to me one morning when I went there alone to buy razor blades and glycerin suppositories for my chronic constipation. He told me that he'd read some of my books, that he recognized me and wanted to tell me that in Santiago the governor and the other authorities had not been elected democratically but had been imposed from the capital by the PRI. They didn't understand local problems, much less the problems of the students.

“They think we're all peons and that we're still in the age of Don Porfirio,” he said. “They don't realize things have changed.”

“Despite 1968?” I asked.

“That's the serious part. They just keep going on as if nothing happened. Our parents are peasants, workers, business people, and thanks to their labor we go to the university and learn things. We tell our parents we have more rights than they think. A peasant can organize a cooperative and tell the mill owner to grind up his mama…”

“Who's probably a grind herself,” I said, without getting even a smile out of the student.

He went on, and I knew I could never expect humor from him. “… or the truck owners, who are the worst exploiters. They decide if they'll carry the harvest to market, when, and for how much, and no discounts. The crops rot. A worker has the right to form associations and doesn't have to be under the thumb of the thugs from the CTM.”

“That's what you tell the people who work here?”

He said he did. “Someone's got to inform them. Someone's got to make them aware of things. Maybe you yourself, now that you're here…”

“I'm writing a book. Besides, I don't want to compromise my North American friends. They're working and can't get involved in politics. It would be a real pain if they did. I'm their guest. I have to respect them.”

“Okay. Maybe another time.”

I shook hands with him and asked him not to take offense. We could get together sometime for coffee. He smiled. His teeth were terrible. And yet he was tall, graceful, with languid eyes, and a sagging Zapata mustache—thin, like his unfinished, patchy, almost pubic beard.

“My name is Carlos Ortiz.”

“Well, well, we're namesakes.”

That he liked. He thanked me for saying it and even smiled.

At night, Diana and I went on building our passion. I didn't dare ask her anything about her past loves, and she didn't ask me about mine. I'd ventured two ideas: the company of death and the natural tendency of couples to form triangles. In reality, what both of us wanted at that stage was to feel ourselves unique, without precedents, one of a kind. The first nights were a matter of words and acts, acts and words, sometimes the one first, other times the other, rarely both at once, because the words of sex are unrepeatable, infantile, often filthy, with no interest or excitement except for the lovers themselves.

On the other hand, the words before or after the act always tended, during those early days in Santiago, to proclaim the joy and singularity of what was happening to us. With Diana Soren in my arms, I came to feel that I had written nothing before I met her. Love meant starting over. She fed and strengthened that idea: she actually told me that we were getting to know each other at the creation, before the past, before Iowa and the little skirt and the moon—she actually said that. Ultimately, she transmuted everything (and I thanked her for it) into a fantastic vision of joy as simultaneity. Sometimes during orgasm she would shout, “Why doesn't everything happen at the same time?” It wasn't a question; it was a desire. A fervent desire in which I joined. Welded to her flesh and her words. Yes, please, let
everything
happen at the same time …

We were unique. Everything began with us. Then literature butted in. I remembered Proust: “To know Gilberte again, as in the time of the creation, as if the past did not yet exist.” And from there it was only a step to the Lucho Gatica bolero that sometimes floated through the window from the servants' rooms: “Don't ask me anything more, / let me imagine / that the past doesn't exist / and that we were born / at the very moment when we met…”

It's true she hadn't read the sentence in a novel by her husband, Ivan Gravet, where he says, more or less, that a couple exists while it can invent itself or because shit's better than solitude. A couple's problems begin when the two of them stop inventing themselves.

I preferred to think I was captured inside the body of this woman like a fetus that grows and fears, when it's thrown into the world, that it loses its nourishing mother, Diana, Artemis, Cybele, Astarte, first goddess …

“I love your cloudy brow,” Diana would say when I thought these things.

“But you always have a clear brow.”

“Ah,” she exclaimed, “if one day you see me suffer, you'll pay for it.”

IX

No sooner did I move into Diana's house than I claimed, like some sixteenth-century Spanish explorer, a territory of my own. There I arranged my portable typewriter, my paper, and my books. Diana looked at me with smiling surprise.

“Won't you be coming to the set with me?”

“You know I can't. I write from eight in the morning until one—it's the way I work.”

“I want to show you off on the set. I want to be seen with you.”

“I'm sorry. We'll see each other every afternoon, when the day's shooting is done.”

“My men always accompany me on the set,” she said, accentuating the smile.

“I can't, Diana. Our whole relationship would fall apart in twenty-four hours. I love you at night. Let me write during the day. If you don't, we'll never get along. I swear.”

The truth is, I was going through a creative crisis whose full dimensions I had yet to measure. My first novels had been successful because a new readership in Mexico identified itself (or, rather,
misidentified
itself) in them, saying
we are
or
we aren't
like that but, either way, giving an engaged, occasionally impassioned response to three or four of my books, which were seen as a bridge between a convulsed, dejected, rural, self-enclosed country and a new urban society that was open but perhaps too apathetic, too comfortable and thoughtless. One phantom of Mexican reality was disappearing, only so another could take its place. Which was better? What were we sacrificing in either case? “I'll always be grateful to you,” said a woman who worked with me in the Foreign Office when I had published my first novel but still needed a bureaucratic salary, “for having mentioned the street where I live. I'd never seen it in print before in a novel. Thank you!”

The truth is, the social dimension of those books would have no real value for me unless it went along with a formal renovation of the novel as a literary form. The
way
I said things was as important as, or even more important than,
what
I was saying. But every writer has a primary relationship with the themes that arise from the world around him, and a much more complex relationship with the forms he invents, inherits, copies, or parodies—every novel contains those elements, feeds on those sources. The novel as a genre and impurity as an idea are sisters; the concept of the novel and the concept of originality are like a pair of mothers-in-law. I did not want to repeat the success of my first novels. Perhaps I made a mistake seeking out my new partnership exclusively in the idea of form and divorcing myself from subject matter. The fact is that one day I reached the palpable point of exhaustion between vital content and literary expression.

Living for several years in Paris, London, and Venice, I searched for the new alliance in my own vocation. I found it, just maybe and just fleetingly, in a funeral chant to the modernity that was wearing all of us out, Europeans and New World Americans alike. We were going to suffer a change of skin, like it or not. The upheavals all over the world in the 1960s did not help me; they only made it obvious that youth was elsewhere, not in a Mexican author who in the crucial year 1968 had turned forty.

But that was also the year of the massacre in the Plaza of the Three Cultures in Mexico City and of the Tlatelolco killings. The unpunished murder of hundreds of young students by the armed forces and government agents brought all Mexicans together, despite our biological or generational differences. It united us, I mean, in terms not only of political parties but of grief. At the same time, it divided us according to whether we supported or opposed the government's behavior. The writer José Revueltas went to jail because of his participation in the movement for reform. At a Freedom of the Press Day dinner, Martín Luis Guzmán, the novelist of the Mexican Revolution, praised President Gustavo Díaz Ordaz, who was responsible for the slaughter. Octavio Paz resigned his ambassadorship in India. The poet Salvador Novo intoned an aria of thankfulness to Díaz Ordaz and our national institutions. In Paris, I circulated petitions demanding amnesty for Revueltas and condemnations of the violence with which the government, lacking political answers, had so bloodily responded to the students' challenge.

The students were no more or less than the children of the Mexican Revolution that I had explored in my first books. They were the youth educated by the revolution, which taught them to believe in democracy, justice, and liberty. Now they were asking only for that, and the government, which had supposedly emanated from the revolution, answered them with death. The official argument until that moment had been: We're going to pacify and stabilize a country ravaged by twenty years of armed conflict and a century of anarchy and dictatorship. We're going to provide education, communication, health, and economic prosperity. For your part, you citizens are going to allow us, in order to attain all that, to postpone democracy. Progress today, democracy tomorrow. We promise. That was the pact.

The kids of 1968 asked for democracy today, and that demand cost them their lives, but it gave life back to Mexico.

I expected the new writers to translate all this into literature, but I did not exempt myself from a hard look: I accused myself of a complicity and blindness that kept me from participating in a better way, more directly, in that parting of the waters in modern Mexican life that was 1968. My recurring nightmare was a hospital where the authorities banned the students' parents and relatives, where no one bothered to tie a tag to the naked toe of a single corpse …

“We're not going to have five hundred funeral processions here tomorrow,” said a Mexican general. “If we allow that, the government collapses…”